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May 5, 2005 07:29 GMT  ·  By

Since they have been competing with smartphones, PDAs are having a rough time, and owning a digital assistant and a phone is no longer justified. Still, somebody had to obtain the award for the bestselling PDA, and BlackBerry was the one to get it because of the always-on Email function which seemed to have made the difference in the first quarter of 2005.

Continuously decreasing PDA sales have miraculously recovered in this first interval of the year because the possibility of permanently staying in contact with the e-mail service offered by Research In Motion (RIM) was highly appreciated by the public.

In a study recently published, Gartner announces the number of BlackBerry PDAs has increased with 3.4 million units, which represents a 75% leap compared to the same period from last year. The market share owned by RIM has increased to 20.8%, an increase of 6% compared to the results recorded a year ago. According to the same source, this first quarter proved to be the most active and the most productive since the appearance of PDAs on the market; in the same time, the prices for these devices has increased with 15%.

?The devices equipped with solutions for wireless network connections that can also be used as phones represented 55% of the total sales from the first quarter", announces Todd Kort, leading analyst within the computing division from Gartner.

Unfortunately, the sales of the main competitor, PalmOne, have decreased with 26.3%, and the market shared followed a similar trend falling under the 18% threshold marking the weakest performance since the company's appearance in 1996.

An appearance, or better said, an interesting come back in this segment, is attributed to the Finnish producer Nokia which managed to occupy the fourth place by launching the models: 9300 and 9500.